The past few weeks (years, if I’m being honest) have been heavy. Social media has been consumed with news about ICE activity, political violence, and conversations that make it hard to feel like showing up to work is important. Our team has felt it. I’ve felt it. And like many businesses, we’ve wrestled with the question: what do we do?
It was an important decision that Online Optimism shouldn’t be posting just to post. No one needs to hear from us in moments like this. We don’t want to take up space that should belong to the communities being directly impacted and the organizations doing the actual work.
But we also know that silence within our own walls isn’t an option.
So instead, I want to share how we’ve tried to practice our values—not perfectly, but intentionally—because I believe that when we take care of our people, they’re better equipped to take care of their communities. It’s like a domino effect: a team member who feels secure taking time off to volunteer, or to process difficult news, or to show up for their neighbors can do more good in the world than any corporate statement ever could.
That’s the approach we’ve chosen, and I hope it’s useful to other business leaders trying to figure out how to support their teams through difficult times.
Creating Space for People to Be Human
One of our company values is “Keep it Human.” When major events happen—whether it’s political violence, natural disasters, or personal loss—we’ve learned that the most important thing we can do is acknowledge that our team members are whole people who bring their worries and grief and fear with them when they log on each day.
Our first step is always proactive outreach from leadership. When something significant happens in the news, we send a message to the team reminding them that if they’re struggling, they can and should take time off. We don’t penalize them for it—we have unlimited sick days, and won’t take it from their PTO. It sounds obvious, but I’ve learned that people often need permission to prioritize their mental health, especially in work cultures that glorify being “always on” (which can be a particular burden of remote work).
The day of the National Shutdown, we scheduled an hour-long, open-invite Google Meet for team members that were at work to connect and decompress. There was no pressure to join and company leadership sat out, giving space for team members to find community on an emotionally heavy day.
Building Flexibility Into Our Structure
The thing about claiming to care about employee wellbeing is that you have to actually build systems that support it (and be open to evolving them). For us, that’s meant creating policies that acknowledge the full complexity of people’s lives:
We offer mental health days without requiring explanation or justification. We have unlimited bereavement leave, because grief doesn’t follow a schedule. We give people time off for appointments without making them use PTO. We understand that some days or occasions carry a heavy cloud, but that work can be a wanted distraction—so we created and encourage the use of “Personal Focus Days,” where an Optimist is online and working, but doesn’t have to worry about putting on a happy face for meetings.
These aren’t revolutionary ideas, but implementing them does require trust. It means believing that people will do good work even when you’re not monitoring their every move. Business leaders should be happy knowing that their team member is cared for, and that someone who takes a mental health day will likely return more focused and productive than if they’d powered through.
Putting Money Behind Our Values
We also try to align our resources with our company values through how we support nonprofit work.
Our Donate + Elevate program allows team members to donate to causes they care about, and the company will match their contribution to that cause as well as our company-wide beneficiary. If I give $5 to a 501(c)(3), Online Optimism would give that same 501(c)(3) another $5, and then give $5 to a secondary organization that we select as a team. This year, we intentionally aligned our nonprofit matches with organizations focused on immigration justice—a quiet way to support critical work without centering ourselves in the conversation.
Through our GIVE program, our Optimists have 2 paid days each year to volunteer with any nonprofit(s) of their choice.
Instead of giving out just kudos for good work, every 3 months we tally up the number of shout outs an Optimist received in our “appreciation” Slack channel and we make a donation to a nonprofit of their choice. You can see the organizations our team chose in 2025 here.
In 2020 we started an optional company-wide book club where we discuss books through a lens of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some of the books we’ve read are The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, Splinters by Leslie Jamison, and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; our current book is Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Pérez. Online Optimism purchases books for anyone interested from bookshop.org with Baldwin & Co—an independent book store in New Orleans—as our selected beneficiary, and carves out time during the workday for discussion. It’s a small investment that signals we value learning and growth beyond billable hours.
Making Space for Connection
We’ve created affinity groups where team members can connect around shared identities and experiences. These aren’t company-run initiatives—they’re spaces for people to find community with each other, facilitated but not controlled by leadership. Some of the current groups serve LGBTQ+ Optimists, Optimists who identify as women, and BIPOC Optimists. If a team member has interest in building a new affinity group, leadership gladly does the ground work to get the group going.
The goal of our affinity groups is simple: people shouldn’t have to choose between bringing their full selves to work and feeling safe and supported.
Aligning Our Client Work with Our Company Values
This is where it gets trickier, but this is one of our most important efforts. We can’t claim to have values and then do work that contradicts them.
We research every potential client to ensure a values misalignment doesn’t occur.
There are some industries we just won’t work with, like weapons manufacturers and private prisons. If a potential client is in an industry that exists in a gray space, we leave it up to the company to vote. If more than 25% of the company votes no, we don’t move forward with the pitch. If an employee voted no but we are still moving forward with a pitch, we do our best to keep them from working on the account. And, importantly, we don’t penalize them for this—we follow our company value to Build on Trust with our employees, taking Optimists at their word if they feel strongly enough to express their concern.
Is this always easy? No. Have we figured it all out? Definitely not. But we’ve decided that building a company aligns with our values is worth the occasional difficult conversation.
What I’m Still Learning
You don’t have to have it all figured out to start doing something.
We’re learning as we go, making mistakes, and always trying to do better. I’ve been an Optimist for over 9 years, and when asked if I see myself staying at Online Optimism, I’ve always pointed to our efforts on being an ethical and moral organization as a big reason I continue to stay.
As I’ve moved through leadership roles, I’ve come to understand that waiting until you have the perfect policy or the perfect words helps no one. The most important thing is to start.
You can start by asking this question: When we say we care about our people, what does that actually look like in practice?
For us, it looks like creating space. It looks like building flexibility into our systems. It looks like investing in causes that matter. It looks like giving people agency over their own work and lives.
It’s not always comfortable, and it’s definitely not always efficient. But I believe it’s the only way to build a company that can sustain itself, its people, and its community.
Because at the end of the day, putting people first isn’t about making grand statements. It’s about the small, consistent choices we make when no one is watching. It’s about building structures that support people even when—especially when—the world feels heavy.
That’s the work. And it’s worth doing.
